The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To spare you a long rambling post I wrote: Yes. But there's many more reasons to not say anything, an important one of which is feeling that either I can't find the right words or the words I can find would only make things worse. However in reference to the question at hand the motives are all either neutral or defensive.
In a nutshell avoidance or conflict aversion of one form or another is a much more probable cause than passive aggression.
On balance if you're confident that's what is happening and you want to reconcile then perhaps it's best to take the bait and cut to the chase. But if someone has backed off because they feel imposed upon then following them around making further impositions will only make them back off further, or drive them towards adopting a mode closer to active aggression. For a teenage boy I'd assume they withdrew in response to feeling imposed on in some manner rather than ignoring you to "get you back", but there's always exceptions.
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